Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman

 

Summary (from the publisher): One woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Europe, and an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory.

Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled “Correspondence: Patients A–G.” What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; instead, what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood out: those from Valy—Valerie Scheftel. Her grandfather’s lover who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.

Valy’s name wasn’t unknown to her—Wildman had once asked her grandmother about a dark-haired young woman whose images she found in an old photo album. “She was your grandfather’s true love,” her grandmother said at the time, and refused any other questions. But now, with the help of the letters, Wildman started to piece together Valy’s story. They revealed a woman desperate to escape and clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom.

Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman. On in the course of discovering Valy’s ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescuing a life seemingly lost to history.

Review: In the years after her grandfather's death, author Sarah Wildman finds letters written to her grandfather from Valy, his girlfriend who was left behind when he fled Europe just a few months before the Nazis took over Austria. With the help of the letters, Sarah starts to piece together Valy's story and seeks out those who might have known her to fill in the gaps in the story. 

As a child, Sarah Wildman was presented a tale of a triumphant grandfather with a fairy tale escape from Europe after a beautiful childhood. The truth was more complex: her grandfather did escape. He did have a successful life as a doctor in America. And he did flee with family members and build a beautiful life with his American wife. But he also left many behind, including family, friends, and his first true love Valy. And he faced many obstacles, including many recriminating letters from relatives left behind who were frustrated that he escaped and seems to have left them behind. 

In some ways, it is strange that Valy is the focus of this book. She is not a relative of the author after all. She is the other woman, the girlfriend who came before, who first occupied the space eventually sealed by her grandmother. But her voice, captured forever in her haunting and plaintive letters, is such captivating that it is easy to see how the reader would want to know about her life and her fate. And what the author uncovers is a sad story. Valy is not lucky like the author's grandfather. She yearns to be recognized as a doctor but forced to do menial nursing work. She is shuffled from housing to housing and more and more rights stripped from her until the Nazis finally come for her. I was astonished that the author was able to track down one of her friends in her final days and possibly one of the only people alive that can account for her final days before deportation. 

One thing that is hard to accept - and that was obviously difficult for relatives and friends left behind in Europe to accept - is why the author's grandfather failed to respond to so many pleading letters not only from Valy but other relatives. Sarah Wildman pieces together the financial straits he was in, the sense of hopelessness he likely had, the survivor's guilt that likely led to his silence: "Does he love Valy? I think he does. I think she was the love of his youth, the love of his Vienna years, the years that shaped him, and and he loves her as much for what she stands for as for who she is. But his inability to get her out of the Reich makes her also a source of pain, of guilt, and this makes it hard for him to know how to relate, let alone how to write, to her. What will he say, after all? That he went boating with the woman who would become my grandmother? Or that he is worried about not bringing in enough money from one month to the next? By now he knows it does not compare to what she is facing" (225). But still, as a reader, I wish he would have written, and I wish his thoughts were known. 

This book is written from the perspective of the author's own journey to uncover what she can of this history and this story relating to her family. While I appreciated some of this - such as her inclusions of other survivors' stories that she talked to along the way - much of it felt intrusive and long-winded asides that detracted from the main story. For instance, she details at length her unpleasant relationship with one tour guide in Europe and is constantly referencing how she was breaking down in tears and her early pregnancy. I think the book would have been more powerful with a more streamlined focus on Valy and her grandfather's story. 

Stars: 3.5